I hope I can gush effectively, she thought. Hope I can satisfy them with my gushing.
She looked outside the living room window onto Sunset Court. Sunset Court. Sun-Set Court. Jennifer had always liked the sound of that. Sunset Court. Unlike Tully, who said she hated the name of her own street, Grove Street, and told everyone she lived in ‘the Grove.’ Please drive me to the Grove, Tully would say. The Grove.
‘Jen, phone!’
She picked up. ‘How’s my birthday girl?’ boomed a familiar jolly voice. ‘Couldn’t be better, Dad,’ she said. Maybe a little better. ‘Ma, it’s daddy,’ she called across the house, relieved he didn’t want to talk to her again. This was the fourth time he had called today, each time greeting Jennifer with a resounding ‘How’s my birthday girl?’
Jennifer went back to arranging the records. Bee Gees, Eagles, Stones, Dead, Van Halen. The Grease soundtrack, the Beatles. A little lone Garfunkel. Pink Floyd. As she worked, her face was soft, her gaze blinkless, her body outwardly relaxed, nearly motionless. But inside her head there was a relentless noise, and to shut it out she started counting her records and then counting sheep. One sheep, two sheep, three sheep…two hundred and fifty sheep think of nothing but sheep. Calm, she thought, calm.
4
Tully walked purposefully but not fast. She knew she had to go home – it was five-fifteen and home was more than a mile away from where she had left Julie. She needed to shower, get ready, and walk back to the party by seven. Yet Tully did not rush. She walked slowly up Jewell.
The three girls lived in a geographical near-straight line from each other, with Jennifer’s house on Sunset Court the farthest away from Tully and in the nicest neighborhood. Julie lived on Wayne and 10th, in a four bedroom two-floor bungalow that housed five kids and two adults. Tully lived closest to the Kansas River. The low-level rush of the river would’ve been soothing to her if only the river hadn’t been drowned out by the endless hum of the Kansas Turnpike and the clanging of freight trains on the St Louis Railroad. If not for the Kansas Pike and the railroad, and the sight of the horrendous structure that was the City of Topeka’s sewage disposal plant, the sound of the river would have indeed been pleasing to Tully.
On her way home, Tully passed a park so small it had no name. There the kids from the nearby elementary and nursery schools played on weekdays. The playground was long on the ground and short on the play, with only the standard slide, a swing, and a seesaw to entice the little ones. Not like the great playground at Washburn University. Now, that was a playground, thought Tully, sitting down on the swings and swinging for a while. She was rocking herself gently, back and forth back and forth, when she heard a woman with two young babies heading her way. The older boy was toddling along and griping about something, while the infant was squawking in a huge pink carriage. The trio passed by her, the little boy grumbling to his mother to take him to the ‘baby sings.’ Looking at Tully, the woman smiled wanly, walking after her son. Tully smiled back. She watched them putter about, watched them aimlessly, without time, without thought, without feeling – until she remembered Jennifer’s party, got up hastily, and hurried out.
Standing in front of her bedroom mirror, Tully appraised herself. Her hair needed perming and bleaching again. Skin was too pale, thanks to the sunless summer, and her cheeks had on too much rouge – made her look like a clown in the daylight. But now, in the evening, it was more acceptable. More acceptable to who? Tully thought. To mother?
Tully had not been to a party by herself for more than a year.
Tonight’s the night, she thought, straightening her collar and adjusting the belt on her leather pants. I’m too angly. Not quite thin, but angly. Arms, legs all over the place. And not enough breasts to go with them. Wide hips with no meat on them. She touched her behind. Too flat. To match my chest. She peered into her face, bringing herself flush against the mirror. Squinted her eyes. Hey, you. You going to a party by yourself? Aren’t you a little young to be going anywhere by yourself? Aren’t you only seventeen? Hey, you?
Too much makeup, she’ll say, thought Tully. Too much eye shadow, too much mascara. Will she even notice? She was sleeping when I came in, maybe she’ll stay asleep…In any case, I’m not coming into a house full of people with nothing on this face, that is just not what’s going to happen. Say it.
‘I am plain,’ she said. Plain. ‘Plain Tully, that’s what they call me.’
But I look all right now. The red blouse’s nice (to match my red lips). But tight. Pants are tight, too. She’ll never let me out again if she sees me. Seventeen and a half, but just too young to go out, just too young to go. Tully snickered. Now, isn’t that just the biggest joke in the Grove. Ah, yes, but I’m so safe here at home. Why, this is the safest place.
Tully found a toothpick. A party! How many people? How many of them guys? How many on a football team? Nice going, Jen. She smiled. Jennifer even promised there might be some guys at the party Tully – remarkably enough – did not know.
Tully started making friends with boys when she was around thirteen, going to a bunch of boozeless kiddie parties. Then boozeless kiddie parties started to bore her silly, and when she was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen but looked nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and had the ID to prove it, she went around with a wilder crowd. Most of the girls she hung out with were not in school anymore. Some were pregnant, all were husbandless. Some were still in school but truant; many were in foster homes. It all seemed kind of fun at the time. Nothing quite like a dozen kids, running around the Midwest, going to College Hill, drinking beer, dancing on the tables, smoking pot, having a good ol’ time. She got to know some older boys then, too; some college students. They looked like men and talked deep like men, but when it came to wanting to touch her, they had no self-control, just like boys. Mother did a lot of sleeping back in those days and didn’t mind Tully’s going out. After working hard for the Topeka refuse plant every day, who would have the energy for anything but sleep? Tully had been telling her mother she was sleeping over at friends’ houses since she was thirteen, knowing Hedda Makker would always be too tired to check. That’s what it was, thought Tully, as she ran a pick through her frizzy hair. She’s always been just plain too tired to ask me where I’ve been.
The younger boys and the older boys had all watched Tully dance, danced with her, and cheered her when she danced alone. They came up to her, they bought her drinks, they laughed at her jokes. All those boys who kissed her told her she was a good kisser; who fondled her told her she had a good body. Tully scoffed but listened to them all the same. And some had come calling for her in the following few days but did not stay long, disheartened by the stares of her mother and her Aunt Lena, or by the condition of the beaten-down house in the Grove with a broken front window, broken during Halloween of 1973 and boarded up ever since. Or disheartened by the Grove or by the railroad or by the river.
In many ways, Tully minded Topeka more than the Grove itself. Oh, it was just a town, a small, subdued green capital town, with empty streets and lots of cars. But when the town ended, and quickly end it did, after a narrow street, or a road that suddenly became a hill, there was nothing but the prairie stretching out ad infinitum. Fields and grass and an occasional cottonwood, all on their way to nowhere, windblown, ravaged by fires, never broken up by an ocean or even a sea. Just pastureland, millions of miles long, seemingly up to the sky, westward, outward, onward, to absolutely nowhere. Tully never felt more intensely confined than when she thought about the vastness beyond Topeka.
For sure, there were other nearby towns. Kansas City bored her. In Manhattan, there was nothing to do. Emporia and Salina were smaller than Topeka. Lawrence was a